William W. Fisher III 34 The new [contextualist] history turns a blind eye to the important dictumthat unrecognized power is everywhere, that (at least in all hitherto existing societies) relations of command and obedience have become routinized or 'sedimented’ in the institutionalized forms of life within which speaking and acting subjects are formed ... [The new history’s] aim of producing a ‘real historv’ of political ideologies more closely resembles an official historv that unwittingly defends the spell-binding hold of past ideologies over the present. In spite of its modest and detached intentions, the new history clings to an old and suspect motto: Tout comprendre, e’est tout pardonner.-- How, then, do the Textualists think intellectual history should be practiced? At a minimum, they contend, historians should change their tone of voice - should become more openly perspectival, should acknowledge that there are many plausible interpretations of any given document.Next, historians should assume toward the past a posture that is neither positivist nor nihilistic - should try to achieve, in other words, a “tense interaction between empirically based reconstruction of the past and dialogic exchange.”-'^ Such a posture liberates historians to ask of old texts frankly anachronistic questions - questions that pertain to the historians’ current concerns and would have meant littie to the authors of those texts. Howdo Thorstein Veblen’s economic theories illuminate the character of late-twentieth-century welfare capitalismWhat might Kant, once his work has been purged of “outdated foolishness,” tell us about our situation today What is the contemporary significance of seventeenth-century philosophic grammar?-^ Finally, intellectual historians should “brush history against the grain” — should bring to the surface critical or transformative interpretations of canonical texts, including ways in which they may have subverted the ideological contexts in which they were written.-^ The fourth approach. New Historicism, was originally developed in the 1980s by a group of literary critics (most of whom happened to specialize in the English Renaissance) who sought a methodological alternative to both New Criticismand Deconstruction. Very recently, their writings have captured the attention of a growing group of intellectual historians. •2- Keane, supra n. 17, 213, 217. See, for example, Hayden White, “The Burden of Historv,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 47—18; Alan Megill, “Recounting the Past,” American Historical Revieiv 94 (1989): 636. Dominck LaCapra, “Intellectual History and Its Ways,” American Historical Revieic 97 (1992), 427. John P. Diggins, The Bard of Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and Modern Social Theory (New f’ork: Seabury Press, 1978). P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s ‘’Critique of Pure Reason" (London: Methuen, 1966). The quotation comes from Richard Rortv’s comment on the book, quoted in Harlan, supra n. 17, 603. Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1966). LaCapra, supra n. 24, 435-37. The phrase is from Walter Benjamin.
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